April 15, 2025 • 26 mins
I'm jacking into cyberspace for some pain and pleasure.
'Neuromancer' by William Gibson is a sci-fi classic that was right at the beginning of the cyberpunk genre. We follow Case in a futuristic techno world where he is hired to hack into a wealthy family's lair. He is part of a motley crew each with their own specialty, hired by an AI to free itself from it's restrictions. Think of Japan, robots, drugs, implants, space, fashion, tech, culture, violence and sex to get a good idea of the new world.
If you got value from the podcast please provide support back in any way you best see fit!
Timeline:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:02) Themes/Questions
(00:17:30) Author & Extras
(00:23:05) Summary
(00:25:42) Value 4 Value
(00:26:07) Join Live!
Connect with Mere Mortals:
Website: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReU
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/meremortalspods
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcasts/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meremortalspodcasts
Value 4 Value Support:
Boostagram: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/support
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/meremortalspodcast
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kyrin Down (00:00):
I'm jacking into cyberspace for some pleasure and some pain.
Welcome everyone to another episode of the mere mortals book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live on the 04/16/2025.
And as you might surmise, this is the podcast where you can sim stim directly into my body, into my brain, and watch me as I'm reading these books in real life.
(00:27):
Okay. No. You can't do that, and you might get some pressure on playing this in my life as well. But no. We do have this book here today where you can do this, which is Neuromancer
by William Gibson. So this was originally published in 1984,
about 300 pages in length. I'd say it took me about six hours reading to get through in total. It's not super, super long, and it's actually a very fast read, in some cases. In some other cases, it can be a rather difficult read, but we'll talk about that soon. This is a sci fi classic that was right at the beginning of the cyberpunk genre,
(01:00):
which is this myth stir of the cyber the future with the punk, the kind of anarchic
violence,
body modification sort of scenes and melded together. And this was, I guess, one of the books that created this type of genre.
So in the book, we follow Case, who is a
futuristic
techno hacker, I guess, if you will. I believe he's American.
(01:23):
Although
boundaries of countries and things like this have blurred a lot in this futuristic world.
And he is hired to hack into a wealthy family's lair, which is actually out in outer space. So he's joined by a motley crew of people. We have Molly, the muscle. We have Armitage, the planner. We have Peter Rivera, who's the,
(01:44):
the con man, I guess, if you will.
Malcolm, maybe he is even the pilot.
And they all interact together to
essentially
try and free an AI from its,
captureings from its restrictions,
so it can exist out in the world. So if you wanna think about all of this, think of
Japan,
(02:05):
robots, drugs,
implants,
space,
violence,
sex, fashion, tech, culture.
All of this is blended into this book
as we follow
the case. And it's told from his point of view as he goes through all of his trials and tribulations
to, you know, free all of these things. I make it kinda sound adventurous, and it is, but it has this gritty real undertone, which is the more punk aspect to this
(02:31):
of the of the violence of, you know, really weird stuff, which would,
is is very futuristic in in our cases, but also kinda like, oh, why would you do that? Why would anyone be interacting and behaving like this? Now there's 34 24, sorry, chapters in total in this book, but they don't have titles, no meanings. So they're just a way of separating scenes,
(02:53):
more,
in this case, which is actually useful because once again, the scene changes in this book is a little bit hard to understand at times. So let's jump into the themes and questions.
What makes us human and
does technology make our lives better? And,
it's kind of a simple question. You know, what what is a human
and what what are the essential things of them? And you might start off with something like, oh, it's the body. You know, humans are, you know, they've got a head, they've got two arms, they've got two legs, they've got a torso,
(03:23):
and various organs and things like this.
And I think those assumptions are taken for granted in some some case, at least in our current world, and even that's starting to change.
Because in this new world of where Neuromancer is set,
that is not the case. You cannot tell a human
solely from their body or you cannot say that a human is their body in many cases. So we start off with, I guess, Case living in in Chiba, and he's kind of out and down of his luck.
(03:53):
He's had a virus put into his mind, which means he can't interact with cyberspace, which is being delve into this world of the matrix, which, you know, think of
lines and codes and numbers, but represented as a
actual
three d imagery, if you will. And
he is living in this world and he's interacting with, I guess, normal people. You see, merchants, you see barman, you see floozies,
(04:18):
regular people going about their day, businessmen,
pimps, all these sorts of things. I guess it's maybe not every day regular for for
the vast majority of people at the moment. But you see, okay, like, he's interacting with humans.
But almost from the get go, we see that these humans have very modified bodies.
The barman rats has this pure mechanical arm,
(04:41):
which he uses. We see that, you know, case himself has
had neurological
damage done to him. So his brain is not technically the brain that he was born with in some cases, and we're not even really
shown how people are born in this world. We do have evidence of of cloning in it, but not necessarily natural birth.
(05:02):
Molly, who has these kind of cybernetic eye implants,
which enhance her vision and with
these steel razor blades or some sort of very sharp metallic thing underneath her her fingers, which can extract extract and extend and,
come in at at her will. We see the Panther Moderns, which this kind of anarchic
(05:26):
terrorist group in some sort of case, which have taken bottom body modification to even further extremes of
almost turning themselves into cats and, you know, will change their pupils to become catlike,
their movements to become catlike and or at least one of them in this case. So we see, all right, these people are not their bodies and
these free siders even. So these are the rich, wealthy people.
(05:49):
Imagine the most bizarre body modification you've seen on perhaps TV
ever, which would be someone like the guy who's tried to turn himself into Ken or the woman who's tried to sell turn herself into Barbie or people with the, you know,
mouse
mouse like features or cat like features with kind of whiskers trying to turn themselves into these bizarre creatures with hooks in their bodies or metal or implants all over their face and things like this. And that is probably about the regular person you will find in this world.
(06:22):
And,
I guess we can see that even in today's world,
we don't necessarily
associate every part of our body with ourselves.
There are people who have had heart transplants and so have another people's heart in them. We have all sorts of things like nuts and bolts in our arms if we break our arm and things like this,
pacemakers.
(06:43):
We can already start to see. Alright. Like and if we've got your Neuralink and,
things like that coming up, we could start to see like, okay, it could be regular for us to have actual impairments and technology put into our body. This world just takes it to a much further extreme. So
if it's not necessarily our bodies,
(07:03):
what is it that makes us human? This is probably where I'd start to say it's like our emotions and motives and these kind of mixed together.
It's very hard to determine what a human will do. And the
AI in this world named Wintermute
has said that like it when it interacts with humans, it is very much on a
(07:24):
case by case
status. It's always constantly evolving because it can't plan and predict
what humans will do. Whereas with technology,
it's much more easy for it to understand zeros and ones, that's weightings or probabilities.
And, you know, it can plan ahead. Whereas with humans,
it's very hard to understand or interpret what's going to happen.
(07:47):
This is shown right at the start with a rather bizarre and unnecessary
scene, in my humble opinion, where Molly has sex with Case and, you know, they've just met. She's kind of the muscle to,
pull him into this motley crew and get them started on their adventure in some sort of case. And,
you know, she's this, like,
(08:07):
elegant, refined, dangerous, sexy girl. And he's this deadbeat,
you know, barely living loser,
can't scrape together a few dollars or,
what would they call it? Yen.
In this book, there was another name for it, new yen or something like that. And
she has sex with him. And it's just like, there's a really
(08:30):
bizarre and rather odd pairing for casual sex.
That that was one thing that kind of threw me from the start.
As we go on through the book, we see, you know,
why is case still trying to unleash winter mute from its kind of restrictions?
It's, you know, he's got these poisons in his body and
(08:50):
winter mute is the only one that can kind of help solve him and, you know, release these,
let him live. But that doesn't seem to be his driving factor for doing this. Molly, once again, is ambiguous why she kind of continues on with this rather dangerous scenario.
We see the suicide of Ashpool,
who I guess he's kind of been tortured a little bit, but he's, you know, one of the wealthiest, richest, most powerful people in this universe. And he's when we first interact with him, he's committing suicide.
(09:20):
The lady
three Jane and her mother, Marie Francis,
kind of surreal desires. What do you do when you have
almost infinite wealth, infinite power,
have license to do whatever you want
and the technology to make it happen.
And they
kind of destroy themselves, but not destroy themselves. They try and create a legacy, but also at the time, at the same time, not do it. You know, there's a whole bunch of things in this where you go,
(09:51):
I don't understand why or what this human is trying to do. And,
this is, I guess, like the real human aspect because there's
quite a few things in this book which are human like, but not exactly there. So
we have things like the AI Wintermute and it's kind of AI compatriots
Neuromancer.
(10:12):
We have this construct, which is a I guess you would call it the embodiment
of a person
into cyberspace and their brain.
So it's a construct of a guy who used to live called Flatline
and
even to a certain extent,
Armitage, who has been psychologically
manipulated so that he's become much more robotic and
(10:36):
and easy to control.
You know, they behave
optimally.
All their decisions are kind of calculated.
They somewhat
follow requests and orders a lot better than humans would.
There's no second guessing or doubt or fear when they take actions. These these types of things aren't really part of their
(10:58):
makeup. They simply act.
And
even then, we can kind of see, like, there's human like things in them. The the two AIs, Neuromancer and Wintermute are battling against each other.
Armitage does lose control of the
the underlying
human within him, which is a broken up war veteran called Corto.
(11:23):
And
they,
you know, the flat line, for example,
one of the the things that really bothers case when he's interacting with this guy who used to be his friend, his mentor,
is, when he's interacting with him in cyberspace, Flatline has this this laugh, and it's this kind of cold, metallic laugh. It doesn't have the human warmth in it, doesn't have the,
(11:47):
I guess, the zest of life. And it's it's
inhuman like and it it irks him and puts him off. So those are just a couple of thoughts, I guess, of
what would happen perhaps to ourselves if we developed a future like this or we start merging with machines.
And
what what actually is it that makes us human? It's more the emotions and motives rather than the actual
(12:11):
flesh bodies that that we have.
But there could be a case to be made that the more you
construct yourself, the more you modify yourself, the more you lose control of it. And,
if you've ever played the book, I think it's, the game called Cyberpunks. And there was a a Netflix series also called, I think called Cyberpunks
(12:32):
Edge Runners or something like this.
The you go cyber cyberpsycho
if you modify your body too much. And so that is a a world where you have the opposite case. So,
this book is, you know, it's fun to think about, but obviously, there's no scientific grounding for for any of these things. The technology part is is more is more fun as well.
(12:54):
When we look at it in this book,
look, first of all, it's a dope world. So, so fucking cool
and yet rather bleak for a lot of people. And
when we think about technology, I think by and large, we think it's a good thing. Yet there is acknowledgments that, okay, bad stuff can happen. So
in this world,
(13:15):
I wouldn't necessarily say it's a good world. There's a lot of death and violence and drug use
and suicide
that goes that goes on in this and killings.
So if you were to look at it, you just from this book, you'd probably go like, oh, this is not so good. But obviously,
this is a story and we're thrown into a very extreme situation.
(13:36):
So if we were to take any of the individual characters that we meet, and
who are just in their or normal everyday lives, and I'm thinking of Julie Dean,
the the smuggler of Linda Lee, the the kind of young 20 year old floozy or who doesn't really know what she's doing with their life, the lost girl in some cases, rats the bartender,
(13:57):
Malcolm the pilot, Kath the rich social socialite.
You know, if we were just to look at their lives,
and on day day to day, year by year,
decade by decade basis, we could probably say, like, okay, there's there's a lot of freedom that happens in here. You know,
whilst
the there's parts of this world which
(14:18):
are dark and dirty, which is kind of cheaper Japan. We also have Freeside, which is sunny and in space and everyone is wealthy and happy.
The sprawl is this kind of industrial
area yet
urban
futuristic place in in The US. I think Boston,
Boston area
yet,
(14:39):
Bayoglu
sounds kind of like a current day Istanbul with the markets and the
excitement, the dust, the dirt and things like this. So the world is not everything has not been
cleansed and transformed
into,
this, you know, clean monochrome
white
world, it's still very
(15:01):
dungy and has aspects of it which are like, okay, there's a lot in here, which is is not particularly nice. And I think that kind of current mirror, mirrors our current world.
Over the long run, technology
increases prosperity.
We see a lot of wealthy people in this book able to have basically all the material things that they want.
(15:21):
It increases lifespan. There's people in this book who are hundreds of years old, if not longer,
and allows for freedom of all sorts to express yourself in ways which are impossible at the moment and can change the world to make it more hospitable to live. There's people living up in in outer space, for example.
So all of these things you you'd probably say, like, okay, overall, that's a that's a certainly a plus point for technology.
(15:45):
Yet there's still extreme wealth disparity.
There is still drug use.
Humans still do really, really
messed up things. I'm looking at you, Peter Rivera here, who is somewhat of a,
I guess you'd call him a psychopathic,
torturer
in in in this world.
(16:06):
The pain is still both real
in the physical sense,
as we see people getting
killed and,
we see it in the emotional sense of
betrayal of,
you know, losing loved ones, of things not being right, of feeling fear and doubt, and also in some sort of
(16:28):
new way with the Simpson where Case can directly
go into Molly's body. He feels the things that she's feeling, yet they are not physically happening to his own body. So I don't know what you call that,
a secondhand pain, something like that.
So
I think this mirrors exactly the real world. You know, drugs can save lives in this world, and yet there is a fentanyl
(16:55):
epidemic. And, we saw
mortality drop in The US
over the last couple of years because of a lot of suicides and things like this.
So, you know, is technology all good or all bad? It's neither, but it's probably more trending towards good. And to top this off, probably the the the thing that tips it over the the edge is that you can have,
(17:18):
hologram pussy jewelry, which
which is what people were wearing on their wrists. Instead of a wristwatch, it'd be like a hologram with a with a vagina there. So that's pretty cool. You know, who wouldn't want to sign up for that? So jumping into the author, perhaps some extra details.
William Gibson was born in 1948,
American author,
(17:39):
is rather eclectic. He's traveled a lot. His early 20 periods of his life was was, rather interesting from the little bio that I read of him.
He's kind of credited with popularizing
this cyberpunk genre, as I was mentioning. And this book is
the one of the first breakouts of this. This is to be distinguished from cypherpunk,
(17:59):
cypherpunk,
which is
more related to using cryptology
to,
be anti establishment
and
for beneficial purposes, whereas cyberpunk is this
mix of the
cyber world
and more the technology, the gadgets, the applications,
(18:20):
the physical
substantiation
and how this would look in a kind of
anarchic,
dirty, crazy world, something like this. So,
he's had lots of books. We'll publish lots of books with, I believe, two sequels to this, which I might try and get to in the future because,
it was a decent book. I enjoyed it.
(18:40):
And he created a lot of words, and this is how you know it's a classic. Things like flatlining, the matrix, cyberspace,
jacking in biological microchips are all things that he came up with this in this book and have somewhat influenced modern culture
with, you know, the Matrix movies, for example. So,
with that,
(19:01):
I guess, vocab that he came up with in these,
what would you call them, thematic,
memes that have made it into popular culture? We see this a lot with his actual words in the book. The vocabulary that he uses is very descriptive
and the things that even just the names sound really great.
Yeah, Yeah, Heuans
(19:23):
kind of do sound like cigarettes in the book. Screaming Fist is an excellent,
war attack code name which is used. The people in this book Step and Razor, Winter Neuromancer,
three Jane, a gene for
naming of people is very
exotic and
conjures up images of this world, which are, I think, really strong in that they're still
(19:46):
understandable to us, but they are so different as well. Now, this does have drawbacks because
there were numerous times throughout the book where I would have to look up words.
If you know what semiotic,
hypnagogic,
triptych means just out of, you know, out of your normal vocabulary, kudos to you. I didn't. So I'd have to look up words like this.
(20:07):
And these combined with all the stuff he invented means that at times you
are going to struggle
to really understand what is going on in the scene.
Visualizations
are a lot of heavy lifting is left for you to do because
he doesn't make it super easy.
And even at times, for example, right at the end of the book, it's this, you know,
(20:32):
a three syllable word which is used to unlock winter mute to free it from its restrictions.
And I had to go back,
ask the Internet reread at times to actually figure out what that word was. And it, you know, turned out to not necessarily be a word. It was more toned. So there's going to be things in his style which
(20:52):
are so surreal.
You just have to kind of roll with the punches.
The scene changes
can be rather dramatic, and
you might not understand
that a scene has changed.
The chapters help,
the spacing
of paragraphs help, but at times, you're still gonna be like, woah, woah, woah, wait, wait, like, what just happened? Where are we right now?
(21:17):
So it did feel like my brain was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
But there was a lot of subtle touches in the book as well, which I think add it really added to the depth that made it feel like it wasn't
purely just this futuristic world that he's conjured. But it's like, Yeah, okay, that's how humans would behave. Or this is
a inversion of expectations, which would make sense.
(21:39):
One classic scene for me was
case was on this train
or subway of some sort in,
in the in the sprawl. And
he sees this group of, I guess, they're they're just kind of normal body modified people.
They're businessmen, perhaps. I'm not exactly sure what they were. But there was some evangelical Christians on the on the train as well. And you could see that they were gearing up to go and talk to these people and tell them about the good word. And from my understanding, these evangelical
(22:10):
Christians were probably purists. They didn't have any body modifications.
And this was kind of scaring these other people because it's like, what kind of freak
wouldn't,
you know, have at least some sort of body modifications,
which is rather funny. And it's a it's kind of a switch, much like how nowadays
I think that
you the the person who is like the
(22:33):
anti establishment or more going against the grain is the person who doesn't get a tattoo, especially if you're in your twenties.
Now, where
that is probably now the thing which is like, woah, you're you're bucking against the trend of culture.
You don't care what your other people or friends say about, you know, let's all get a tattoo together and things like this. And it's like, no, I'm not going to. So I love this kind of subtle
(22:58):
switch of expectations. That was that was really cool and mirrored something I'm seeing even in everyday life now. So jumping on to the summary, similar book recommendations.
It's just a cool fucking book, man.
Everything about this just screams like, this is awesome.
These
yeah. It's it's really hard to
read it and not be like, man, I want to see this. Like, I want to be there. It just it just has this.
(23:24):
I don't know how to describe it really.
An atmosphere
of
you wanting to be there and experiencing that. I felt FOMO by not living in this world or at least experiencing it. So I love the various worlds that are all combined.
The scene switches
from, you know, this futuristic Chiba Japan that's dark and dirty to
(23:45):
the industrial
kind of wasteland yet urbanistic
sprawl in America
to free side up in space, this, you know, wealth and luxurious
place to the
Istanbul type
marketplace
to even the the lair, the villa straight light of the of the Tessier Ashpools, who are this wealthy family, they're infiltrating
(24:09):
all of this just conjures up like really, really cool imagery.
And the
story itself, you know, the body mods,
the AI is trying to escape. And yet there's
these Turing people who are kind of the ones enforcing those restrictions, guess like you'd call them space police in some sort of case, the grungy vibe surrounded by insane tech,
(24:31):
the mini
plot lines of love, of betrayal, of
manipulation by the AI. All of it was just so cool, so
very compelling. It was hard for me to put this book down
and easily probably
I would say it's the best sci fi book I've I've read ever. So Neuromancer
(24:52):
by William Gibson
giving it a very solid eight and a half out of 10 to highly recommended read would would recommend
and similar books recommendations. I mean, the one that recalls to me is Snow Crash, which I covered on this channel a couple of years ago. I gave that a seven and a half. I
it's it, in my opinion, lacks in comparison to to this book.
(25:15):
And
the metaverse concept,
whilst interesting,
I feel
is cooler
in this book, which is of cyberspace and
the matrix and
the kind of attacking and hacking that case does
with, the Quang
Chinese
hacking program and the AI, the visualizations there, I think, are much cooler. So that's gonna be my little wrap up for today.
(25:42):
This is a value for value podcast. If you enjoyed it, I would really appreciate if you gave some value back to me and to one as well at the same time. So you can do this time, talent, treasure, share this. You know, word-of-mouth is super critical.
Love hearing your book recommendations as well. What you think I would enjoy reading and then finally some treasure. There's some links down below which you can click on if you want to support us monetarily.
(26:05):
And, you know, I am live here
on eleven a. M. Australian Eastern Standard Time on a Wednesday. This will be the case for the next two to three weeks, three weeks probably. And then I'm going to be traveling and there's going to be a bit of a gap
whilst traveling because whilst I was still trying to be read reading, it's gonna be very hard for me to actually do these book reviews because I'll be all over the place. So,
(26:29):
gap coming up in the future. What am I reading at the moment?
I am reading,
two books.
One is
kind of Metamorphosis
and Other Stories by Franz Kafka,
and the other is Primer for Forgetting by Lewis Hyde. So those are probably two that'll be coming up soon. And,
yeah, we'll leave it there for today. Thank you very much for joining in. Hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. Ciao for now. Karen out. Bye.
I'm jacking into cyberspace for some pleasure and some pain.
Welcome everyone to another episode of the mere mortals book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live on the 04/16/2025.
And as you might surmise, this is the podcast where you can sim stim directly into my body, into my brain, and watch me as I'm reading these books in real life.
(00:27):
Okay. No. You can't do that, and you might get some pressure on playing this in my life as well. But no. We do have this book here today where you can do this, which is Neuromancer
by William Gibson. So this was originally published in 1984,
about 300 pages in length. I'd say it took me about six hours reading to get through in total. It's not super, super long, and it's actually a very fast read, in some cases. In some other cases, it can be a rather difficult read, but we'll talk about that soon. This is a sci fi classic that was right at the beginning of the cyberpunk genre,
(01:00):
which is this myth stir of the cyber the future with the punk, the kind of anarchic
violence,
body modification sort of scenes and melded together. And this was, I guess, one of the books that created this type of genre.
So in the book, we follow Case, who is a
futuristic
techno hacker, I guess, if you will. I believe he's American.
(01:23):
Although
boundaries of countries and things like this have blurred a lot in this futuristic world.
And he is hired to hack into a wealthy family's lair, which is actually out in outer space. So he's joined by a motley crew of people. We have Molly, the muscle. We have Armitage, the planner. We have Peter Rivera, who's the,
(01:44):
the con man, I guess, if you will.
Malcolm, maybe he is even the pilot.
And they all interact together to
essentially
try and free an AI from its,
captureings from its restrictions,
so it can exist out in the world. So if you wanna think about all of this, think of
Japan,
(02:05):
robots, drugs,
implants,
space,
violence,
sex, fashion, tech, culture.
All of this is blended into this book
as we follow
the case. And it's told from his point of view as he goes through all of his trials and tribulations
to, you know, free all of these things. I make it kinda sound adventurous, and it is, but it has this gritty real undertone, which is the more punk aspect to this
(02:31):
of the of the violence of, you know, really weird stuff, which would,
is is very futuristic in in our cases, but also kinda like, oh, why would you do that? Why would anyone be interacting and behaving like this? Now there's 34 24, sorry, chapters in total in this book, but they don't have titles, no meanings. So they're just a way of separating scenes,
(02:53):
more,
in this case, which is actually useful because once again, the scene changes in this book is a little bit hard to understand at times. So let's jump into the themes and questions.
What makes us human and
does technology make our lives better? And,
it's kind of a simple question. You know, what what is a human
and what what are the essential things of them? And you might start off with something like, oh, it's the body. You know, humans are, you know, they've got a head, they've got two arms, they've got two legs, they've got a torso,
(03:23):
and various organs and things like this.
And I think those assumptions are taken for granted in some some case, at least in our current world, and even that's starting to change.
Because in this new world of where Neuromancer is set,
that is not the case. You cannot tell a human
solely from their body or you cannot say that a human is their body in many cases. So we start off with, I guess, Case living in in Chiba, and he's kind of out and down of his luck.
(03:53):
He's had a virus put into his mind, which means he can't interact with cyberspace, which is being delve into this world of the matrix, which, you know, think of
lines and codes and numbers, but represented as a
actual
three d imagery, if you will. And
he is living in this world and he's interacting with, I guess, normal people. You see, merchants, you see barman, you see floozies,
(04:18):
regular people going about their day, businessmen,
pimps, all these sorts of things. I guess it's maybe not every day regular for for
the vast majority of people at the moment. But you see, okay, like, he's interacting with humans.
But almost from the get go, we see that these humans have very modified bodies.
The barman rats has this pure mechanical arm,
(04:41):
which he uses. We see that, you know, case himself has
had neurological
damage done to him. So his brain is not technically the brain that he was born with in some cases, and we're not even really
shown how people are born in this world. We do have evidence of of cloning in it, but not necessarily natural birth.
(05:02):
Molly, who has these kind of cybernetic eye implants,
which enhance her vision and with
these steel razor blades or some sort of very sharp metallic thing underneath her her fingers, which can extract extract and extend and,
come in at at her will. We see the Panther Moderns, which this kind of anarchic
(05:26):
terrorist group in some sort of case, which have taken bottom body modification to even further extremes of
almost turning themselves into cats and, you know, will change their pupils to become catlike,
their movements to become catlike and or at least one of them in this case. So we see, all right, these people are not their bodies and
these free siders even. So these are the rich, wealthy people.
(05:49):
Imagine the most bizarre body modification you've seen on perhaps TV
ever, which would be someone like the guy who's tried to turn himself into Ken or the woman who's tried to sell turn herself into Barbie or people with the, you know,
mouse
mouse like features or cat like features with kind of whiskers trying to turn themselves into these bizarre creatures with hooks in their bodies or metal or implants all over their face and things like this. And that is probably about the regular person you will find in this world.
(06:22):
And,
I guess we can see that even in today's world,
we don't necessarily
associate every part of our body with ourselves.
There are people who have had heart transplants and so have another people's heart in them. We have all sorts of things like nuts and bolts in our arms if we break our arm and things like this,
pacemakers.
(06:43):
We can already start to see. Alright. Like and if we've got your Neuralink and,
things like that coming up, we could start to see like, okay, it could be regular for us to have actual impairments and technology put into our body. This world just takes it to a much further extreme. So
if it's not necessarily our bodies,
(07:03):
what is it that makes us human? This is probably where I'd start to say it's like our emotions and motives and these kind of mixed together.
It's very hard to determine what a human will do. And the
AI in this world named Wintermute
has said that like it when it interacts with humans, it is very much on a
(07:24):
case by case
status. It's always constantly evolving because it can't plan and predict
what humans will do. Whereas with technology,
it's much more easy for it to understand zeros and ones, that's weightings or probabilities.
And, you know, it can plan ahead. Whereas with humans,
it's very hard to understand or interpret what's going to happen.
(07:47):
This is shown right at the start with a rather bizarre and unnecessary
scene, in my humble opinion, where Molly has sex with Case and, you know, they've just met. She's kind of the muscle to,
pull him into this motley crew and get them started on their adventure in some sort of case. And,
you know, she's this, like,
(08:07):
elegant, refined, dangerous, sexy girl. And he's this deadbeat,
you know, barely living loser,
can't scrape together a few dollars or,
what would they call it? Yen.
In this book, there was another name for it, new yen or something like that. And
she has sex with him. And it's just like, there's a really
(08:30):
bizarre and rather odd pairing for casual sex.
That that was one thing that kind of threw me from the start.
As we go on through the book, we see, you know,
why is case still trying to unleash winter mute from its kind of restrictions?
It's, you know, he's got these poisons in his body and
(08:50):
winter mute is the only one that can kind of help solve him and, you know, release these,
let him live. But that doesn't seem to be his driving factor for doing this. Molly, once again, is ambiguous why she kind of continues on with this rather dangerous scenario.
We see the suicide of Ashpool,
who I guess he's kind of been tortured a little bit, but he's, you know, one of the wealthiest, richest, most powerful people in this universe. And he's when we first interact with him, he's committing suicide.
(09:20):
The lady
three Jane and her mother, Marie Francis,
kind of surreal desires. What do you do when you have
almost infinite wealth, infinite power,
have license to do whatever you want
and the technology to make it happen.
And they
kind of destroy themselves, but not destroy themselves. They try and create a legacy, but also at the time, at the same time, not do it. You know, there's a whole bunch of things in this where you go,
(09:51):
I don't understand why or what this human is trying to do. And,
this is, I guess, like the real human aspect because there's
quite a few things in this book which are human like, but not exactly there. So
we have things like the AI Wintermute and it's kind of AI compatriots
Neuromancer.
(10:12):
We have this construct, which is a I guess you would call it the embodiment
of a person
into cyberspace and their brain.
So it's a construct of a guy who used to live called Flatline
and
even to a certain extent,
Armitage, who has been psychologically
manipulated so that he's become much more robotic and
(10:36):
and easy to control.
You know, they behave
optimally.
All their decisions are kind of calculated.
They somewhat
follow requests and orders a lot better than humans would.
There's no second guessing or doubt or fear when they take actions. These these types of things aren't really part of their
(10:58):
makeup. They simply act.
And
even then, we can kind of see, like, there's human like things in them. The the two AIs, Neuromancer and Wintermute are battling against each other.
Armitage does lose control of the
the underlying
human within him, which is a broken up war veteran called Corto.
(11:23):
And
they,
you know, the flat line, for example,
one of the the things that really bothers case when he's interacting with this guy who used to be his friend, his mentor,
is, when he's interacting with him in cyberspace, Flatline has this this laugh, and it's this kind of cold, metallic laugh. It doesn't have the human warmth in it, doesn't have the,
(11:47):
I guess, the zest of life. And it's it's
inhuman like and it it irks him and puts him off. So those are just a couple of thoughts, I guess, of
what would happen perhaps to ourselves if we developed a future like this or we start merging with machines.
And
what what actually is it that makes us human? It's more the emotions and motives rather than the actual
(12:11):
flesh bodies that that we have.
But there could be a case to be made that the more you
construct yourself, the more you modify yourself, the more you lose control of it. And,
if you've ever played the book, I think it's, the game called Cyberpunks. And there was a a Netflix series also called, I think called Cyberpunks
(12:32):
Edge Runners or something like this.
The you go cyber cyberpsycho
if you modify your body too much. And so that is a a world where you have the opposite case. So,
this book is, you know, it's fun to think about, but obviously, there's no scientific grounding for for any of these things. The technology part is is more is more fun as well.
(12:54):
When we look at it in this book,
look, first of all, it's a dope world. So, so fucking cool
and yet rather bleak for a lot of people. And
when we think about technology, I think by and large, we think it's a good thing. Yet there is acknowledgments that, okay, bad stuff can happen. So
in this world,
(13:15):
I wouldn't necessarily say it's a good world. There's a lot of death and violence and drug use
and suicide
that goes that goes on in this and killings.
So if you were to look at it, you just from this book, you'd probably go like, oh, this is not so good. But obviously,
this is a story and we're thrown into a very extreme situation.
(13:36):
So if we were to take any of the individual characters that we meet, and
who are just in their or normal everyday lives, and I'm thinking of Julie Dean,
the the smuggler of Linda Lee, the the kind of young 20 year old floozy or who doesn't really know what she's doing with their life, the lost girl in some cases, rats the bartender,
(13:57):
Malcolm the pilot, Kath the rich social socialite.
You know, if we were just to look at their lives,
and on day day to day, year by year,
decade by decade basis, we could probably say, like, okay, there's there's a lot of freedom that happens in here. You know,
whilst
the there's parts of this world which
(14:18):
are dark and dirty, which is kind of cheaper Japan. We also have Freeside, which is sunny and in space and everyone is wealthy and happy.
The sprawl is this kind of industrial
area yet
urban
futuristic place in in The US. I think Boston,
Boston area
yet,
(14:39):
Bayoglu
sounds kind of like a current day Istanbul with the markets and the
excitement, the dust, the dirt and things like this. So the world is not everything has not been
cleansed and transformed
into,
this, you know, clean monochrome
white
world, it's still very
(15:01):
dungy and has aspects of it which are like, okay, there's a lot in here, which is is not particularly nice. And I think that kind of current mirror, mirrors our current world.
Over the long run, technology
increases prosperity.
We see a lot of wealthy people in this book able to have basically all the material things that they want.
(15:21):
It increases lifespan. There's people in this book who are hundreds of years old, if not longer,
and allows for freedom of all sorts to express yourself in ways which are impossible at the moment and can change the world to make it more hospitable to live. There's people living up in in outer space, for example.
So all of these things you you'd probably say, like, okay, overall, that's a that's a certainly a plus point for technology.
(15:45):
Yet there's still extreme wealth disparity.
There is still drug use.
Humans still do really, really
messed up things. I'm looking at you, Peter Rivera here, who is somewhat of a,
I guess you'd call him a psychopathic,
torturer
in in in this world.
(16:06):
The pain is still both real
in the physical sense,
as we see people getting
killed and,
we see it in the emotional sense of
betrayal of,
you know, losing loved ones, of things not being right, of feeling fear and doubt, and also in some sort of
(16:28):
new way with the Simpson where Case can directly
go into Molly's body. He feels the things that she's feeling, yet they are not physically happening to his own body. So I don't know what you call that,
a secondhand pain, something like that.
So
I think this mirrors exactly the real world. You know, drugs can save lives in this world, and yet there is a fentanyl
(16:55):
epidemic. And, we saw
mortality drop in The US
over the last couple of years because of a lot of suicides and things like this.
So, you know, is technology all good or all bad? It's neither, but it's probably more trending towards good. And to top this off, probably the the the thing that tips it over the the edge is that you can have,
(17:18):
hologram pussy jewelry, which
which is what people were wearing on their wrists. Instead of a wristwatch, it'd be like a hologram with a with a vagina there. So that's pretty cool. You know, who wouldn't want to sign up for that? So jumping into the author, perhaps some extra details.
William Gibson was born in 1948,
American author,
(17:39):
is rather eclectic. He's traveled a lot. His early 20 periods of his life was was, rather interesting from the little bio that I read of him.
He's kind of credited with popularizing
this cyberpunk genre, as I was mentioning. And this book is
the one of the first breakouts of this. This is to be distinguished from cypherpunk,
(17:59):
cypherpunk,
which is
more related to using cryptology
to,
be anti establishment
and
for beneficial purposes, whereas cyberpunk is this
mix of the
cyber world
and more the technology, the gadgets, the applications,
(18:20):
the physical
substantiation
and how this would look in a kind of
anarchic,
dirty, crazy world, something like this. So,
he's had lots of books. We'll publish lots of books with, I believe, two sequels to this, which I might try and get to in the future because,
it was a decent book. I enjoyed it.
(18:40):
And he created a lot of words, and this is how you know it's a classic. Things like flatlining, the matrix, cyberspace,
jacking in biological microchips are all things that he came up with this in this book and have somewhat influenced modern culture
with, you know, the Matrix movies, for example. So,
with that,
(19:01):
I guess, vocab that he came up with in these,
what would you call them, thematic,
memes that have made it into popular culture? We see this a lot with his actual words in the book. The vocabulary that he uses is very descriptive
and the things that even just the names sound really great.
Yeah, Yeah, Heuans
(19:23):
kind of do sound like cigarettes in the book. Screaming Fist is an excellent,
war attack code name which is used. The people in this book Step and Razor, Winter Neuromancer,
three Jane, a gene for
naming of people is very
exotic and
conjures up images of this world, which are, I think, really strong in that they're still
(19:46):
understandable to us, but they are so different as well. Now, this does have drawbacks because
there were numerous times throughout the book where I would have to look up words.
If you know what semiotic,
hypnagogic,
triptych means just out of, you know, out of your normal vocabulary, kudos to you. I didn't. So I'd have to look up words like this.
(20:07):
And these combined with all the stuff he invented means that at times you
are going to struggle
to really understand what is going on in the scene.
Visualizations
are a lot of heavy lifting is left for you to do because
he doesn't make it super easy.
And even at times, for example, right at the end of the book, it's this, you know,
(20:32):
a three syllable word which is used to unlock winter mute to free it from its restrictions.
And I had to go back,
ask the Internet reread at times to actually figure out what that word was. And it, you know, turned out to not necessarily be a word. It was more toned. So there's going to be things in his style which
(20:52):
are so surreal.
You just have to kind of roll with the punches.
The scene changes
can be rather dramatic, and
you might not understand
that a scene has changed.
The chapters help,
the spacing
of paragraphs help, but at times, you're still gonna be like, woah, woah, woah, wait, wait, like, what just happened? Where are we right now?
(21:17):
So it did feel like my brain was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
But there was a lot of subtle touches in the book as well, which I think add it really added to the depth that made it feel like it wasn't
purely just this futuristic world that he's conjured. But it's like, Yeah, okay, that's how humans would behave. Or this is
a inversion of expectations, which would make sense.
(21:39):
One classic scene for me was
case was on this train
or subway of some sort in,
in the in the sprawl. And
he sees this group of, I guess, they're they're just kind of normal body modified people.
They're businessmen, perhaps. I'm not exactly sure what they were. But there was some evangelical Christians on the on the train as well. And you could see that they were gearing up to go and talk to these people and tell them about the good word. And from my understanding, these evangelical
(22:10):
Christians were probably purists. They didn't have any body modifications.
And this was kind of scaring these other people because it's like, what kind of freak
wouldn't,
you know, have at least some sort of body modifications,
which is rather funny. And it's a it's kind of a switch, much like how nowadays
I think that
you the the person who is like the
(22:33):
anti establishment or more going against the grain is the person who doesn't get a tattoo, especially if you're in your twenties.
Now, where
that is probably now the thing which is like, woah, you're you're bucking against the trend of culture.
You don't care what your other people or friends say about, you know, let's all get a tattoo together and things like this. And it's like, no, I'm not going to. So I love this kind of subtle
(22:58):
switch of expectations. That was that was really cool and mirrored something I'm seeing even in everyday life now. So jumping on to the summary, similar book recommendations.
It's just a cool fucking book, man.
Everything about this just screams like, this is awesome.
These
yeah. It's it's really hard to
read it and not be like, man, I want to see this. Like, I want to be there. It just it just has this.
(23:24):
I don't know how to describe it really.
An atmosphere
of
you wanting to be there and experiencing that. I felt FOMO by not living in this world or at least experiencing it. So I love the various worlds that are all combined.
The scene switches
from, you know, this futuristic Chiba Japan that's dark and dirty to
(23:45):
the industrial
kind of wasteland yet urbanistic
sprawl in America
to free side up in space, this, you know, wealth and luxurious
place to the
Istanbul type
marketplace
to even the the lair, the villa straight light of the of the Tessier Ashpools, who are this wealthy family, they're infiltrating
(24:09):
all of this just conjures up like really, really cool imagery.
And the
story itself, you know, the body mods,
the AI is trying to escape. And yet there's
these Turing people who are kind of the ones enforcing those restrictions, guess like you'd call them space police in some sort of case, the grungy vibe surrounded by insane tech,
(24:31):
the mini
plot lines of love, of betrayal, of
manipulation by the AI. All of it was just so cool, so
very compelling. It was hard for me to put this book down
and easily probably
I would say it's the best sci fi book I've I've read ever. So Neuromancer
(24:52):
by William Gibson
giving it a very solid eight and a half out of 10 to highly recommended read would would recommend
and similar books recommendations. I mean, the one that recalls to me is Snow Crash, which I covered on this channel a couple of years ago. I gave that a seven and a half. I
it's it, in my opinion, lacks in comparison to to this book.
(25:15):
And
the metaverse concept,
whilst interesting,
I feel
is cooler
in this book, which is of cyberspace and
the matrix and
the kind of attacking and hacking that case does
with, the Quang
Chinese
hacking program and the AI, the visualizations there, I think, are much cooler. So that's gonna be my little wrap up for today.
(25:42):
This is a value for value podcast. If you enjoyed it, I would really appreciate if you gave some value back to me and to one as well at the same time. So you can do this time, talent, treasure, share this. You know, word-of-mouth is super critical.
Love hearing your book recommendations as well. What you think I would enjoy reading and then finally some treasure. There's some links down below which you can click on if you want to support us monetarily.
(26:05):
And, you know, I am live here
on eleven a. M. Australian Eastern Standard Time on a Wednesday. This will be the case for the next two to three weeks, three weeks probably. And then I'm going to be traveling and there's going to be a bit of a gap
whilst traveling because whilst I was still trying to be read reading, it's gonna be very hard for me to actually do these book reviews because I'll be all over the place. So,
(26:29):
gap coming up in the future. What am I reading at the moment?
I am reading,
two books.
One is
kind of Metamorphosis
and Other Stories by Franz Kafka,
and the other is Primer for Forgetting by Lewis Hyde. So those are probably two that'll be coming up soon. And,
yeah, we'll leave it there for today. Thank you very much for joining in. Hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. Ciao for now. Karen out. Bye.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com